Cutting the beam

The stairs go through between the ground and first floor, where - against the wall - there's an old beam - probably one of the fort's original ones, so maybe 700 years old. It has an outer layer, maybe a centimetre thick, heavily attacked by woodworm and quite friable, but below that the wood is like a newly cut beam, except that the colour is a little darker.

I've been cutting a diagonal rebate into the beam to let the stringer sit tightly against the wall. The beam overhangs the finished wall surface by five or six centimetres, and like almost everything else it's neither square nor vertical.



I've attacked with a saw, a hammer and chisel, with two different hand planes and with an electric plane. That final surface is the hand plane and chisel, and it's as close to square and vertical as I've been able to make it. Working at this angle results in all the woodchips going down your (left) sleeve.

I'm fitting it to a plywood template that I hope is an accurate copy of the stringer I've made. I wanted to be sure that I didn't cut away too much, and that I got the angle of the cuts right.



The next job is to cut the two ends of the stringer to fit between the cross-beam here and the newel post at the bottom. I'm not confident of getting a clean cut with a saw, so I'll try using a jig and the router to get a good edge. Of course, the jig needs to be a nice straight line, and that took some work.



Using this should also let me do the tenons that are needed at the newel post ends of the stringer. It should work better for that than for a complete cut - for the latter, once the router has taken me down the first few centimetres, I'll probably have to do the rest with a saw.